All about my activities, thoughts, inspiration, ideas, and everything that happened around me

Friday, December 01, 2006

Selenium: Helps You Test WebApps

Just imagine that you are a web application tester. You tried several things, and suddenly, you found a bug on the application. You tell the developer about the bug and they will fix it soon or later on. After they fix it, they will notify you directly or by changing the status in some kind of bug tracker or defect management system which is being deployed by your company. So you will have to test it again and unfortunately, the process to reproduce the bug is quite long. You may skip some steps, but it may not the same way you reproduce the initial bug. So how do you solve this?

Well, Selenium is the right apps for you. If you have know Camtasia, then it works almost like that. Camtasia can used to create presentation or demos and it records the activities on the screen and make a movie format as output. What you need is something like this, but in addition, you can ask Selenium to replay the activities (just think of automated test) and you can apply steps you have taken to reproduce the initial bug. By using this application, you can cut down some time to take some steps before you can reproduce the bug. It's very efficient and helpful application.

If you are running Firefox browser, then you can get them running by installing the extension directly and restart your browser and it will be activated. Next, when you want to conduct some test, just press the record button and it will start recording. When you found a bug, stop the recording and you can navigate each steps that you have taken again by playing it again.

Taken from Selenium's web page:

Selenium IDE is not only recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use its recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.

Features:

* Easy record and playback * Intelligent field selection will use IDs, names, or XPath as needed * Autocomplete for all common Selenium commands * Walk through tests * Debug and set breakpoints * Save tests as HTML, Ruby scripts, or any other format * Support for Selenium user-extensions.js file * Option to automatically assert the title of every page